Murphy’s law applies even to SEO: things will go wrong . We’ve written previously about what went wrong at our agency before we founded ContentKing and the kinds of SEO fails ContentKing catches on a daily basis. Now we’ll turn to some of the brightest SEO experts for interesting SEO fails they’ve witnessed. Location redirection gone wrong Barry Adams was hired by a client to bounce back from a failed website migration. Here’s what happened: His client moved from a country-specific domain name to a general domain name At the same time, they launched separate international sections of their site So they went from domain.nl to domain.com/nl while also launching domain.com/de , domain.com/gb , and a few more. They implemented hreflang tags , and redirects from the .nl to the .com were also in place. They thought they’d done all the necessary preparation and were good to go. They launched the new site, and their traffic just plummeted. It was a total disaster. The issue was a relatively simple, but far too frequent one: they had an automatic redirect in place based on each visitor’s IP address, where the visitor was immediately sent to the correct country version of the site. SEO fails – IP based redirects A visitor from the Netherlands would be sent to domain.com/nl ; a visitor from the United Kingdom would be sent to domain.com/gb , and so on. This IP address based redirect was present on every single page on the site. If you […]

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